Hustle Con: The Startup Conference For Non-Techies

You want to launch a tech startup, but you’re not a programmer. Then Hustle Con, being held April 24th, 2015, in San Francisco, is the event for you. That doesn’t mean you’ll be uncomfortable or bored if you’re a techie and you attend. You’ll love it as much as everyone else there since you’ll get to hear from speakers like Tim Westergren of Pandora, Dave McClure of 500 Startups, and Arum Kang of Coffee Meets Bagel. But the organizers go out of their way to make sure non-technical founders feel at home, because not everyone with a good idea and the ability to make it reality has a technical background.

Hustle Con team 2014. Image courtesy Hustle Con.

Hustle Con is managed by Sam Parr. He’s 25 years old. In 2013 he was a college student in Tennessee when he received an offer from Airbnb for a position in San Francisco. He flew out to California to tour the Airbnb office and during the visit used the Airbnb service for lodging and as a result met John Havel. Havel had an idea for a roommate matching company. Parr liked Havel’s idea, so he turned down the Airbnb offer, dropped out of school, and moved to San Francisco to join Havel. 10 months later, the company was acquired by Apartment List. After a year of working at Apartment List, Parr was miserable and quit.

While the deal with Apartment List was in progress, Parr met Eric Bahn. Bahn had previously founded and sold BeatTheGMAT, and he became a mentor to Parr. Bahn told Parr about Hustle Con 2013, an event Bahn and co-founder Liz Yin were putting on. It was going to be a one day event with approximately 150 people attending. Parr attended, and loved it. After leaving Apartment List in 2014 Parr asked Bahn if he could organize another Hustle Con. “I put up a crappy website and started creating content,” Parr says. “In just 7 weeks somehow 400 tickets were sold and we made $50,000. I was shocked it went so well.”

After the successful 2014 event Parr decided to turn Hustle Con into something larger for 2015. He convinced Havel to join him, and they organized a team to manage the conference. “The idea behind Hustle Con was that John, Eric, Liz, and I had all started and sold tech companies even though we couldn't code,” Parr explains. “We decided to get the best non-technical founders together to teach.” But over the last year the event has warped into a sort of “startup MBA in a day” with startup founders as the professors. Parr explains, “We wanted to put on an event that taught real actionable stuff from people who actually founded a company, not some MBA professor who hasn't ever started or run a business, or a VP at a company--we want real founders doing the talking.” Parr was drawn to the TED event format, but wanted it to be less uptight and more fast and loose, like a startup. He describes the feel of Hustle Con as “if TED and Coachella had a baby.”

The team announced the event in January and immediately thousands of people sign up for presale email list. Sales of 500 tickets went live on January 22nd and as of this writing are 90% sold out. Due to demand, Hustle Con has added additional workshops on Saturday, the day after the event.

In case you can’t attend, Hustle Con is working on releasing products and content. You can already find great stories on the Hustle Con website like this one about hustlers like Pandora’s founder Tim Westergren, and Parr promises they'll release another similar story each week.